Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-devuan-than-devuan dept.

DistroWatch reports

Geeks determined to resist the systemd juggernaut have several options. For me, the most interesting project is Devuan, a fork of Debian. [...] However, it does have a few flaws

[...] It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running that led me to Refracta, a unique distro that fills a niche that has long been neglected. Refracta's existence predates the systemd wars--it was originally based on Debian 5.0, otherwise known as "Lenny". But when Debian 8.0 "Jessie" went full systemd, Refracta moved to the Devuan camp.

Refracta's chief selling point is this: it's a live image that can be quickly installed, customized, and re-installed again. So basically you can roll your own live CD, configured for your hardware and tweaked to suit your personal tastes. It is currently my favorite distro, and I'd recommend it to any Linux geek who has had a little bit of experience. A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness, but once you've got the basics down, Refracta is easy to get used to.

It's also worth mentioning that even without being installed, a Refracta live CD or USB stick makes an excellent diagnostic and rescue tool. It contains quite a few command line utilities that aren't in a default Devuan or Debian installation, including gddrescue, testdisk, smartmontools, hdparm, lm-sensors, iftop, and iptraf.

[...] Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA.

[...] Starting with version 8.0, Refracta has gone whole-hog at banishing systemd, not to mention PulseAudio. [...] One could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:50PM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:50PM (#419009) Journal

    > After the umpteenth emerge world resulted in broken printing (I teach, so this is a mission critical app for me), I tested Debian Etch on the server, then on the desktop, and never looked back.

    For real, man? I teach, too. I use Slackware-Current, which is technically the alpha for Slackware's releases but is routinely used instead as a rolling release distribution. Printing occasionally breaks, as do other things. It would break less if I only updated the software on my computer once ever two years and only ran software at least four years out of date like you do, but that would be a rather extreme solution. Here's my solution instead. It contains three steps:

    1. Test whether is printing is still working after I update CUPS and fix it if it isn't.
    2. In case I forget to do step 1, don't wait until the last minute to print out exams and stuff, which is a good idea anyway.
    3. In case I forget to do step 2, print from another computer or the printer itself.

    > The chances of me ever swicting back to Gentoo, or any other distro, is zero squared. Getting stuff done without ever having to fight your computer is nirvana.

    Happy you found something that works for you. You sort-of went from one extreme (rolling releases) to the other (already obsolescent biennial releases), but ok then.

    On another note, printing breaks more often than other, more complex functions of the computer. I think CUPS just sucks.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2